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Hooray! Campaign to ‘de-geekify’ Drupal. E-book publishing wrinkles ahead? Opp for .epub?
March 27, 2008 | 9:32 am
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By David Rothman
Oh, the horrors of Drupal and other content management systems for nongeeks!
But what if you didn’t have to mess with PHP and other joys to get a good, functional site, nicely blended with Facebook and other social apps if you wanted?
And how about simplifying the use of other open source software for Web publishing?
“De-geekifying” campaign: Easier site setups and Facebook-type mashups
Chris Pirillo is starting a project to address those issues, and I wish him much luck. That said, let’s keep in mind the risks of trusting the usual suspects with links and data despite efforts to promote data portability. Facebook-style links may not work forever. Luckily Drupal itself comes with community-style features, and, as Robert Nagle has just noted in a comment, sites ideally will even be able to share ad revenue with members.
The e-book angle: I’d love for Chris to encourage the development of a toaster-simple e-book-creation module for Drupal—with the nonproprietray .epub format in use. Imagine the opportunities for small publishers to use Drupal, not just for awesomely interactive sites but also for producing actual books.
Related: Techmeme roundup on the Pirillo campaign., plus Do ordinary users care about data portability? And if not, should they? Four social networks respond, from Steve O’Here on ZDNet.
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Comments:
CMS’s have different functional needs depending on users and content type. Look at WordPress. Teleread has different needs than a portfolio blog or a promotional blog. It’s time to stop relying on generic platforms and start customizing them to a specific kind of content. Up to now, these domain-specific functionality resides in plugins and extensions. But that gets unwieldy. If I’m running a movie review blog, shouldn’t embedded video and rating systems be part of the WordPress’s core functionality? I anxiously await the arrival of niche CMSs. I think Drupal played with the concept of Installation Profiles , but I don’t think anything came from it.
Here’s what I found most interesting:
This idea of user deriving monetary benefit from the amount of traffic going to his territory is appealing. Youtube said they were going to reward User Generated Content (UGC) last year. Why is it taking so long? Does Google not have enough programmers? Or maybe they just don’t have enough experience with online advertising? My guess: They did it only for good PR when in fact they had no plans to give contributors any revenue possibilities. Contrast that with companies like Revver which were giving UGC a piece of the pie from the start.
1 year later, but that is what we are doing with Drupal. BTW they have some heavy focus on install profiles at this point as well.
Contact me if interested in epub format within Drupal.
We are about to build a new data-driven website. I think Drupal 6.x [7.x?] is the best CMS to use. We currently pay for ebook hosting via iPublish central. I’m looking for an os solution that can be integrated with Drupal but which also gives access to ebook widgets such as provided by iPublish or Scribd. Is there any reasonable chance of reproducing their features with epub format in Drupal? If so, I’d be very interested and would be a beta tester.